Most seats are empty and voices are muted, leaving the muzak to dominate my auditory landscape. Occasional songs are unfortunately recognizable, and the rest blend into a weak, banal good cheer, like a receptionist who hasn't had a break for coffee in too many hours.

I'm at the beginning of an apparently roundabout flight from San Jose to San Jose, except that the former is in Cali (fornia) and the latter in Costa (Rica). In one San Jose there are men in camo with rifles watching the security checkpoints. Passengers are not allowed to carry sharp objects of any kind. They must show their government issued identification to four different people to board a plane. The other San Jose is in a country with no army, which boasts more teachers than policeman and whose biggest holiday is election day. The irony, of course, is that the former is the self-proclaimed cradle of freedom and democracy while the latter is in Central America, traditionally associated with instability and military rule.

Quite an inversion, eh? What's happened to the world?

A complete answer to that is a bit long to go into fully right now, but suffice to say that as a passionate libertarian, the United States has always rubbed me the wrong way. Yet, as the nation of my birth, I felt I was stuck with it, and for a long time I thought more about how to change it then the lonely possibility of leaving. I also had no reason to think that anywhere else was better. In the past couple years, I've given up on changing the country, found other people interested in leaving, and realized that there are important ways in which other countries are better, and thus began taking expatriation seriously.

So for the past year, I've been researching the offshore fringe, surfing websites about second passports, tax avoidance, tax evasion, perpetual tourism, offshore banking, and such things. Romantic topics full of fools gold, with scam artists and legit biz blended almost indistinguishably. Perhaps its the romance that does it, draws the suckers and dreamers and visionaries, the unrealistic and the hyperrealistic, and the industries of exploitation that inevitably follow.

Which brings us to the northern San Jose airport, where I await a flight to investigate my top prospect for a new home. Costa Rica is a tiny country between Nicaragua and Panama, with a population of a few million, 2% of whom are expatriates and 1% former americans - the highest american expat population per capita in the world. My mission is to find out why.

So far I know many facts: that the country has no army, that they do not tax offshore income, that the locals are friendly and peaceful, literate and educated, and relatively unstratified, the beaches and rainforests beautiful, the food cheap and plentiful, the climate wet but friendly, internet and phone service common and reasonably reliable, that the high-tech sector has recently eclipsed agriculture and tourism, that one of their 50 senators is the first Libertarian in the world to achieve a national elected office. History, geography, climate - everything one can find in a guidebook swims in my head.

This trip is to fill in the rest, the things a guidebook cannot say. What kinds of expression are on peoples faces, what does the air smell like, what does the energy feel like. Not what is legal, or even what is common, but what is tolerated - drugs, fags, ignoring the rules, forgetting the permits. How bribable are the officials, and do they stay bought? Mostly it boils down to the one basic question that means everything to a libertarian: if I don't directly hurt anyone else, will they leave me alone?

The intersection of true freedom and civilization (or even just infrastructure) is currently the empty set. My dream, vision, or long-term goal (depending on your perspective as to its realism) is to help change that, to either bring freedom to some place civilized or bring civilization to someplace free. It is a very difficult job, one that has been tried, with little success, several times in the past few decades. Whether or not I can succeed, it is easier to shoot the moon by passing to set up the right sort of hand, and moving offshore seems like a good preperatory step. My vision is most likely to become reality on the border between stability and chaos, where some chunk of space can be carved out and dedicated to my cause.

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